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Opinion

In recent years, the growth of health-care costs has slowed down. This is great news for the federal budget, and for those of us who, you know, get health care occasionally. Unfortunately, researchers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services project that the good news may be over. With the population aging, the economy recovering, and the federal health-care plan expanding coverage, they expect health care cost growth to average almost 6 percent over the next decade.

After years of running bloated Olympic Games criticized for their environmental records, the International Olympic Committee decided to make sustainability a goal, using sport as a way to promote better development. Under IOC President Thomas Bach in 2014, it inaugurated Olympic Agenda 2020, a set of 40 reform principles designed to make the Olympics a “plug-and-play” event: Host cities would be chosen in part because the games already fit into their environments and would do minimal damage.

Among those who have the good fortune to waste their time arguing about such things, there is a fundamental and abiding disagreement over the Oxford comma — the final comma in a list of three or more things.

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the production, evolution, and sale of synthetic drugs. Informed observers explain that the term “synthetic drugs” is used to describe a wide range of ever-changing man-made chemical products created specifically to mimic the effects of illicit drugs. Recent reports show that the products are often marketed as harmless fragrances and legally sold in convenience stores and online under the guise of incense or potpourri but that the drugs can be as dangerous as many illicit drugs with the same potential to cause adverse life-altering or lethal consequences. Additional concern surrounds the fact that these drugs are generally not detectable on drug tests.

Normally when a terrorist leader like the Taliban’s Mullah Omar is reported dead, it’s good news for the counter-terrorism world. Think Osama bin Laden in 2011. President Obama boasted about that victory all the way to the next election.

Israel has no reason to launch a military strike against Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks as if Israel might try such a strike, to go after Iran’s nuclear facilities. In fact, Netanyahu has never intended to do so.

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This Pluto stuff amazes me. Ever since I was a child I have been intrigued by our solar system and space itself. I remember staring up into the sky wondering how big the universe was and debating whether it went on forever or had some end. Neither option really made sense to me which just added to the wonder of it all. So to see pictures of Pluto like we’ve never seen before has just been simply fascinating.

I don’t read polls for a living, and certainly don’t want to compete with those who do. But I was intrigued by a new CNN poll that found a majority of Americans in favor of Congress rejecting the recently negotiated nuclear deal with Iran.

When I was a kid, there were two kinds of breakfast cereal: the kind we ate at home, and the kind we only got to eat when we went backpacking and brought along variety packs of miniature cereal boxes. The former were the basics: Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Cheerios, Rice Krispies, Chex. The latter were the “sugar cereals”: Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, and of course the magically delicious Lucky Charms.

When President Barack Obama recently approved Shell’s request to drill in the Arctic, anti-fossil-fuel activists lobbied the Port of Seattle to deny docking rights to the oil giant’s Alaska-bound rig. That effort failed. Then activists persuaded Washington State’s King County to refuse the company a wastewater-discharge permit — an inconvenience that did nothing to stop Shell’s progress. Turning finally to old-fashioned protest, environmentalists in kayaks tried, unsuccessfully, to obstruct the rig en route to Alaska.

Hillary Clinton can’t keep her story straight. I’m not talking about her email servers. She can’t stick to a consistent line on the rather more central issue of the U.S. economy. It is leading to odd tonal shifts in her campaign, and to some foolish policy choices, too.

Following Thursday’s tragedy in a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana — in which a gunman killed two people and wounded nine others — America is once again searching for answers to how such a massacre could have been prevented. At this point we can hardly go a week without a high-profile mass shooting in this country, and the slaughter in Charleston and Chattanooga is still fresh in our minds.